Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
RFC 1738 - 2.1. The main parts of URLs

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### 2.1. The main parts of URLs

A full BNF description of the URL syntax is given in Section 5.

In general, URLs are written as follows:

           <scheme>:<scheme-specific-part>

A URL contains the name of the scheme being used (<scheme>) followed by a colon and then a string (the <scheme-specific-part>) whose interpretation depends on the scheme.

Scheme names consist of a sequence of characters. The lower case letters "a"--"z", digits, and the characters plus ("+"), period ("."), and hyphen ("-") are allowed. For resiliency, programs interpreting URLs should treat upper case letters as equivalent to lower case in scheme names (e.g., allow "HTTP" as well as "http").

Next: 2.2. URL Character Encoding Issues

Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
RFC 1738 - 2.1. The main parts of URLs